My favourite apple pie

I’ve been going a little crazy with the apples. The two young trees in our small city garden (a Bramley, because you have to, and a James Grieve) are bent low with fruit. Friends arrive from the country, or from their own corners of the city, with more bags of apples. The whole house smells of them.

I’ve juiced them and stirred them into cakes and puddings. At night, I let the dog out, turn on the dishwasher, lock up the house and spoon another batch of cooked apples into their muslin hammocks so they can drip drip drip their juice into bowls, to be made into herb jellies in the morning.

Friends arrive with apples.

And twice now, I’ve made this pie. It comes from TheSilver Palate Cookbook, an enormous favourite of mine, picked up on a trip to America in the 80s and now falling apart from decades of love and overuse.

I’m terribly keen on the cosy look of lattice-topped pie, something that would look good cooling on Laura Ingalls’ window sill in Walnut Grove. I could try and tell you how to do it here, but it would go on for ages and we might fall out. What you need is something from YouTube like this (if only for the use of the word ‘cattywampus’ at 8.05). For happiness, try to banish from the kitchen anyone who might be inclined to chip in with ‘You’re doing it wrong!’ at any stage.

Silver Palate Sour-Cream Apple Pie

Making the lattice.

This makes a deep pie with a tender crust - as it cooks, the topping bubbles and melts into caramelised lusciousness under the pretty lattice.  Serve it warm or at room temperature with thick cream, clotted cream or good vanilla ice cream.

I’ve metric’d the ingredients here, because we’re not actually in Walnut Grove, and I link here to the method from epicurious.  I used a mixture of James Grieve apples and Cox’s Orange Pippins – you don’t really want the fluffiness of Bramleys here.  I like to toast the walnuts very lightly in the oven before mixing them into the topping, about 5-6 minutes on an oven tray at 180°C/160°C Fan/Gas 4 should do it.

For the crust:

320g plain flour
60g caster sugar
¾ tsp salt
¾ tsp ground cinnamon
90g butter, chilled and cut into small cubes
90g lard, chilled and cut into small cubes
4-6 tbsps chilled apple juice or water

For the filling:
5-7 tart apples
160ml sour cream
75g caster sugar or vanilla sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
¼ tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp plain flour

For the topping:

3 tbsps light muscovado sugar
3 tbsps granulated or demerara sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
120g shelled walnuts (see note in introduction), roughly chopped

Filling the pie.

Crimped.

My favourite cookbooks of 2014

 

I love a list. They are everyday poems. But if there’s one thing I love as much as a list, it’s books, with the subset of cookbooks having a particularly warm place in my heart. These are the books I’ve loved most this year, the ones which have a place on my kitchen shelves rather than the ones upstairs in my office. There’s barely a week that I haven’t reached for them, stuck in another Post-It note, made another shopping list. If you’re looking for inspiration for your Christmas list, either for yourself or others, I hope you find it useful.

 

A Year at Otter Farm: Inspiring recipes through the seasons by Mark Diacono (Bloomsbury, £25)

Mark was the head gardener at River Cottage and is the owner of the country’s first and only climate change garden. In A Year At Otter Farm, he shares stories and recipes from his smallholding with characteristic candour (‘Sheep are a lovable pain in the arse.’) and much joyful optimism, in the face of blight, scab, frost and floods. Though some of the ingredients may seem exotic, most of the recipes are very straightforward. Lots of preserves and cheering flavoured booze too.

MY MOST-USED RECIPES: Warm salad of Padron peppers, sugar snaps, cherries and halloumi; Pot roast chicken with grapes in milk; Blackcurrant leaf sorbet; Walnut tart.
BEST FOR: Adventurous allotmenteers, those who love to keep their cookbooks on their bedside tables.

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River Cottage: Light and Easy by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (Bloomsbury, £25)
Great, everyday recipes which happen to be dairy- or wheat free. Perfect for busy cooks who want some inspiration for lively, delicious weekday cooking (though there’s plenty for more celebratory occasions too).

MY MOST-USED RECIPES: Buckwheat noodles with wakame and ginger; Lamb with cauliflower and chickpeas; Chocolate and avocado mousse with honeyed strawberries.
BEST FOR: Happy eaters who happen to be dairy- or wheat-free, or would like to be.

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Persiana: Recipes from the Middle East and beyond by Sabrina Ghayour (Mitchell Beazley, £25)
Some people have hospitality in their DNA and supper-club doyenne, Sabrina Ghayour is one of them. Her lively, punchy, colourful recipes may draw inspiration from her Iranian heritage but they’re filtered through the eyes of a thoroughly modern, busy Londoner.

MY MOST USEDRECIPES: Persian bejewelled rice; cumin-roasted carrots with honey-lemon dressing and goats’ cheese; lamb and sour cherry meatballs.
BEST FOR: Generous spirits in a hurry.

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A change of Appetite: Where healthy meets delicious by Diana Henry (Mitchell Beazley, £25)
If you love food, sometimes a little too much, then Diana Henry’s latest book is your friend. Lots of gorgeous, colourful recipes - her genius for combining flavours and her friendly, encouraging tone make this one of my most-used books this year.

MY MOST-USED RECIPES: Japanese ginger and garlic chicken with smashed cucumber; Spiced pork chops with ginger and mango relish; Spiced quail with blood orange and date salad
BEST FOR: Health-by-stealth sybarites

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Best Ever Dishes by Tom Kerridge (Bloomsbury, £25)
In the interests of full disclosure, I edited this book by the two-Michelin-star-holding chef patron of The Hand and Flowers in Marlow. Recipe testing for this book was some of the best fun I had in the kitchen this year and instantly made me the most popular person in my street, as I shared out the spoils. Tom is a big guy with a big heart and a love of BIG FLAVOURS. It’s not a book for spur-of-the-moment cooking, but it’s just the thing for weekend kitchen warriors.

MY MOST-USED RECIPES: Slow-roast harissa lamb with lime couscous; Sticky drumsticks; Raspberry rose water jellies with sweet cheese.
BEST FOR: Adventurous blow-torch-wielding kitchen geeks.

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Plenty More by Yotam Ottolenghi (Ebury Press, £27)
More vegetable-and grain-based brilliance from Yotam Ottolenghi, the man who perhaps more than any other taught us that herbs are an ingredient, not a garnish. One of the things I love about this book is that the chapters are divided into cooking method rather than course or ingredient, because often more than a particular food or flavour, what we yearn for is a texture – mashed, grilled, braised or fried, pick the dish to match your mood.

MY MOST-USED RECIPES: Peas with sorrel and mustard; red onions with walnut salsa; roasted Brussels sprouts with pomelo and star anise; Caramelised fig, orange and feta salad.
BEST FOR: Aesthetes and flavour freaks.

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Honey & Co Food from the Middle East by Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich (Salt Yard, £25)
This husband-and-wife team worked at Ottolenghi, went on to open their tiny, charming café off the very un-charming Tottenham Court Road and then created this book, which is full of generous, loving, exuberant dishes with modern Middle Eastern flavours. It’s intensely happy-making food.

MY MOST-USED RECIPES: Octopus in meshwiya sauce with celery salad; Slow-cooked lamb shoulder with plums and roses; Feta and honey cheesecake on a kadaif pastry base.
BEST FOR: Those happiest feeding a crowd.

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Make Mine a Martini: 130 cocktails and canapés for fabulous parties by Kay Plunkett-Hogge (Octopus, £14.99)

A glorious combination of cocktails – from perfectly-made classics, to entirely new inventions, and plenty of non-alcoholic drinks for kids and on-the-waggoners – and food to go with cocktails, all described at a rattling pace in K P-H’s knowledgeable and engaging style. In my house, I vote this book ‘Least Likely To Be Left On The Shelf’.

MY MOST-USED RECIPES: The gimlet; the fine and dandy; the Somerset leveller; fig anchoïde.
BEST FOR: I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t love this book. That tells you all you need to know about my friends.

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Perfect Preserves: 100 delicious ways to preserve fruit and vegetables by Thane Prince (Hodder & Stoughton, £25)

If you want one book to help you ride the fashionable preserving wave, make it this one. Thane is the preserving expert on The Big Allotment Challenge and knows her curd from her butters, her relishes from her chutneys. My friend Fi and I call her Obi-Jam Kenobi. She knows all.

MY MOST-USED RECIPES: Quince jelly with cardamom and vanilla; Bread and butter pickles; Blackcurrant cordial.
BEST FOR: The well preserved, or those who would like to be.

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Made in India, Cooked in Britain: Recipes from an Indian family kitchen by Meera Sodha (Penguin/Fig Tree, £20)

This is home cooking at its very best, heart- and soul-warming recipes, many of them satisfyingly simple and swift. Meerha Sodha grew up in Lincolnshire watching her mother cook the family dishes of her Gujarati heritage and she shares some of them here, along with other dishes she’s learned or created along the way. Pleasingly you can have lots of them on the table in less time than it would take to order a take away.

MY MOST-USED RECIPES: Aubergine and cherry tomato curry, masala omelette, Roasted cauliflower with cumin, turmeric and lemon; mussels in coconut and ginger sauce; Grimsby smoked haddock kedgeree.
BEST FOR: Maximum impact, minimum effort cooks.

A day out: Petersham Nurseries

 

Maidenhair ferns, squash, yellow dirt floor and tattie mats lining the ceiling.

You know I seldom leave the comforting bosom of London N16, especially not at weekends when there is so much pottering about to be done, between park and market, coffee shop and pub, garden and kitchen. But a couple of weekends ago, I went all the way to Richmond which, though it is still technically London I suppose, is a completely different city altogether. The bustle and noise of the Kingsland Road gives way to leafy lanes, church spires and artful interior design shops, selling the scrubbed-up-and-pressed version of Dalston’s many vintage emporia.

I was going to meet my friends Fi and Rebecca at Petersham Nurseries for lunch. I’d been here before, years ago, when Skye Gyngell was in charge of the kitchen, didn’t manage to get there in the Greg Malouf era, and hadn’t yet tried Lucy Boyd’s food. Lucy is the daughter of the late Rose Gray of the River Café and began her career at Petersham Nurseries as the head gardener before becoming culinary director too, so her plot-to-plate credentials are impeccable. Today, with Damian Clisby as head chef, the food is as pretty as it is delicious.

My starter of scallops, watermelon radish, sea purslane and Amalfi lemon zest.

My main course of loin of venison, white salsify, kale and sparkling crab apple jelly.

Amalfi lemon and mascarpone ice cream.

Raggy dahlias from the garden decorate the tables.

It was like eating in the middle of the poshest village fête ever, as rain pattered down on the roof, vines twirled above our heads and a fierce little robin hopped about on the yellow dirt floor. We ate and drank and talked, before wandering around admiring the breathlessly tasteful bibelots in the greenhouses and the end of the dahlias in the garden.

They wander the tearoom at night. Especially the one on the right.

Artfully distressed paint and white-glazed ceramics, very much part of the aesthetic.

I can never resist a chandelier.

A galvanised tin bath, dressed for best.

Angels’ wings.

Possibly my first and last selfie, among the hyacinth bulbs.

A perfect gift for your housekeeper.

In the greenhouse, we found a stack of our friend Mark Diacono’s books.

Dahlias light up a zinc-topped table.

Gardens are so poignant at this time of year – the last dahlias, verbena bonariensis and cosmos defiantly cling on, before the autumn leaves take over the show.

Sitting on the platform at Richmond Station, a bag of pelargoniums on my lap.


Petersham Nurseries
Church Lane
Off Petersham Road
Richmond
Surrey TW10 7AG
020 8940 5230info@petershamnurseries.com
petershamnurseries.com

Learning to love the muscat (it didn’t take long)

 
I now discover I really like the muscat. This is the reverse of that syndrome where you drag home from your holidays a lurid liqueur (it’s almost always a liqueur), the drink that was so delicious over five-hour lunches on the terrace, only to find that back home it has all the charm of a Fairy Liquid daiquiri. I think the Ms Murderous Heels sour puss made the muscat taste of ashes in my mouth.
Anyway, I like it now. So that will teach her.

I’m always on the hunt for small cookbooks, the sort sold to raise funds for the church roof or the local sanctuary for tap-dancing owls, the ones with four-line recipes and no glossy pictures. So I was very happy to find Recettes d’un Petit Village en Languedoc. It’s a collection of recipes from the residents of Saint Xist, a little village in the Aveyron, collated by Denis Cristol to raise money for their twelfth-century priory. It contains a recipe by Régine Fargier for a simple cake made with muscat which, along with a bowl of very pretty purple plums, inspired a bit of tinkering about and this is the result. Try it. It’s very easy and looks impressive. If you like, you can serve it straight away, warm, as a pudding with cream, crème fraiche or custard. Or serve it cold. Whichever way you serve it, naturally a glass or two of muscat goes very well with it.



Plum and muscat cake

This is really good with the plums, but in summer I imagine it would be really lovely made with peaches or nectarines too.


For the plums:
4-5 plums, just ripe, not too soft
3 tablespoons demerara sugar

For the cake:
250g caster sugar, vanilla sugar if you have it
200g unsalted butter, softened, plus a little more for greasing the tin
4 eggs, separated
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
250g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
A good pinch of salt
200ml muscat

Some icing sugar for dusting, if you like
Serve with crème fraîche or lightly whipped cream


Preheat the oven to 180°C/Gas 4. Lightly grease a 23cm springform baking tin and line the bottom with baking parchment. Butter the parchment.

Halve the plums, stone them, and cut each half into four pieces. Toss them with the demerara sugar and line the tin with the pieces of plum. Try to cram them as closely together as possible.
Beat together the sugar and butter until pale and light. Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla.
Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt into a separate bowl.

In another, scrupulously-clean bowl whisk the egg whites until they form peaks.
Begin to add the muscat and flour mixture to the batter in alternate batches, starting and ending with some of the flour (flour/wine/flour/wine/flour), folding in well with a spatula after each addition.
Fold in a third of the beaten egg whites with a spatula to lighten the batter. Then stir in the rest, lifting the batter with the spatula and gently folding it into the mixture. It should be well combined but you want to keep in as much air as possible. Spoon the mixture over the top of the plums, smooth the top with a spatula, place the tin on a baking tray and bake in the oven for about 55 minutes – a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake should come out clean. It may need a little bit longer. Put it back into the oven and test every 5 minutes.

Place the cake tin on a cooling rack. Run a palette knife around the sides of the tin but leave it to cool for 15 minutes before releasing the sides of the tin and turning it out onto a plate. Gently remove the base of the tin and the baking parchment; serve warm or cold.

All change

A nice, neat plait of violet garlic, which cost a satisfying €5.

Here’s the thing. As soon as I arrive in France, I transfer a credit card and some nice, crisp Euro notes from my large, London wallet to my small, zipped holiday purse. Within an hour of running about to buy fruit and yoghurt, loo paper, bottles of wine and water, and stopping to refuel with coffee, rosé or Ricard, with a reasonable aim and a little luck that little purse could take out a rhino. It weighs as much as a brick.

I suffer from a fear of change. Not merely an antipathy for altering circumstance (though I confess that I was embarrassingly tearful when our beloved hardware shop closed), but a fear of change, monnaie, coin.

I’ll be standing in a queue with my shopping basket, hopeful that this time I’ll make it, this time I will be able to suffer the patient or impatient gazes of the greengrocer, supermarket checkout man, lady in the newspaper shop, queue of locals snaking along behind me, for long enough to count out €2.87, €4.26 or €1.42. And in this fantasy of coin-based confidence, I will be able to perform these mathematical gymnastics without having to dig my glasses out of the very last, most secret and difficult-to-access compartment in my handbag. Ta da! Watch the amazing counting lady, marvel at her fearlessness.

Let’s forget for a minute the one, two and five cent coppery pieces, which surely must cost more to manufacture than they’re worth (Tip: they make excellent curtain weights). It’s the brassy 10, 20 and 50 cent pieces that push my queuing anxiety into overdrive. They’re of an almost identical size and colour and yes, yes, I know there is some tricksy system of grooves around the edge, a half-arsed attempt to help you to distinguish one from another, but really? Enough of this coin-based parlour game. Europe, please could you be the change I wish to see in the world and make the coins substantially different from one another? Perhaps cover the tens in glitter, make the twenties into a flower shape, the fifties play a happy tune (I suggest Ode to Joy is something we could all get behind)?

Until then, I have two choices. One, take on the habit of the very, very young or the very, very old – fill my hand with change and rely on the kindness, patience and honesty of strangers to pick out what the need. Two, my preferred method, just drag out another note and hope for the best. This works, but like all forms of instant gratification, there’s a price. In this case, a little zippy purse overflowing with a pirate’s ransom of coins.

The other day my mother, who is quite terrifyingly clever, said ‘Oh, I’ve cracked that.
‘What, what?’ I asked, excited over what was no doubt a terrifyingly clever solution.
‘I keep all of my notes in my wallet and five euro coins in my pocket,’ she said.
‘And what about all of the small change?’ I said.
‘That? I just leave all that on my dresser.’
Sometimes Terrifyingly Clever is no help at all.


Roasted garlic

Roasted garlic. Simply squeeze the softened cloves onto pieces of bread. So good. Don’t forget to mop up the cooking juices with more bread too.

I was very excited to buy plaits of garlic – rose garlic, violet garlic, regular garlic - from the stall in Agde market on my last trip, not just because it’s delicious, but also because they cost a nice, round €5 each. No change.

Roasting whole heads of garlic is so easy and it makes a good starter or easy lunch with some salad and bread.

Per person:
a whole head of garlic, unpeeled but outer papery layer removed
a splash of white wine
a small bay leaf
a sprig or two of thyme or lemon thyme
a knob of butter and/or a splash of olive oil
some salt and pepper
Preheat the oven to 180°C/Gas 4.

Place a small bay leaf, some thyme, a splash of oil and a bit of white wine into the bottom of a small dish. Put a head of garlic on top. Place a knob of butter on top of the garlic or trickle on a little more olive oil. Sprinkle on some salt and pepper. Seal tightly with foil. (My little dishes have lids, so I bung these on top too. Belt and braces.) You can also do quite a few heads of garlic all together in one dish, of course, just make sure you cover it tightly with foil.

Bake for about 50 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of the cloves. The flesh should be very tender indeed when pierced with a small, sharp knife. If it’s not soft enough, just put it back into the oven for a bit and check again every 5 minutes or so. Remove the foil and lid if your dish has one, and return to the oven for a further 15 minutes. Serve hot.

I love the papery skins.